Mom & Cloclo

 

Paul Anka didn't write My Way. Claude François* did," I said to my beloved Stepmom, who was visiting me in Geneva from her Florida home. 

A timid widow, she had dared to breeze through airports. She adapted to wandering around Geneva alone, riding buses and getting a hairdressing appointment without speaking French.

But, she wasn't ready to accept that Paul Anka wasn't the original writer.

To prove it, I showed her a recording I'd done of a TV show which included hundreds of recordings of that song in all versions including adverts. Also, on the show were the two François sons who get royalties. I'd recorded it to prove to American guests that Anka wasn't the original author.

The original lyrics were very different www.frenchlearner.com/songs/comme-dhabitude/ and Anka did do the English lyrics which were recorded by Sinatra, Presley and others to become huge hits.

Before my eyes, my Stepmom morphed from a 75-year old woman into a teeny bopper loving the French singer. We listened to the tape and she re-listened when I was at work. I could picture her with a bunch of screaming girls at his concerts.

I came home from work one day to have her tell me, "My boy was on TV today." Despite having electrocuted himself in his bath in 1978, there were often videos on a music channel 20+ years later.

My time with my Stepmom passed too quickly. We ate out, visited sites, went up into the mountains, ate fondue. Evenings, when there was often a brief rain, we stood on my balcony to enjoy the rainbow before going inside to play gin rummy. My Stepmom is a tiger at cards and humbled me regularly.

Three years later I was in Paris for a couple of weeks, pretending I was one of the Hemingway crowd. 

 

I love walking along the Seine where they have all the wooden stands with books and magazines. One vendor had mainly Paris Match, including one featuring the funeral of Claude François. 

It was a couple of weeks before my Stepmom's 78th birthday. Finding something she didn't need, didn't want was a challenge. She loved the magazine.

* Claude François. nickname was Cloclo.